Why Project 2025 Is Really "America Last"
far from putting America First, it will make us the laughing stock of the world.
Ok, please forgive me ahead of time if this op/ed becomes a bit obtuse… I have a lot to say and I’ve got to come at it all from the right angle, so it might seem like a long way round, but I feel it is necessary for it to make sense.
The first thing I’d like to talk about is why exactly we were ever “first” to begin with.
You’ve probably heard this thing said, and you may have even said it yourself, because, on the surface, it seems to make sense, but if one has a modicum of understanding of how things really work, it becomes apparent that it’s actually completely wrong. What I am referring to is the oft repeated statement “Why are we wasting all that money on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth?”
The problems with this are two-fold. One, we aren’t really wasting any money, and two, it’s not nearly as much as you might believe. Let’s take part two first.
In it’s entire history, NASA has taken less than 1/4 of a penny from every tax dollar you contribute. Less than one quarter of a cent. To make this easier to understand, if you paid $100 in federal taxes, less than 25 cents of that would go to NASA. That’s far, far less than we give in unnecessary subsidies to profitable oil companies. Companies that make billions every year and really have no need (by their own admission, I might add) for any subsidies at all. How can you complain about 25 cents on the dollar for Space, when you give $10, or $20, or more to companies that don’t even need it?
We could easily double NASA’s budget and take a small amount away from those oil companies, and they would not even notice the difference, but NASA surely would. A manned mission to Mars would no longer be a pipe dream. An actual space station, research on a viable “Beanstalk” and so many other things that would definitely improve all our lives (and yes, I’ll get to that part).
The other part, that we aren’t wasting that money, well, people often claim we throw away billions of dollars on space research. This was especially true during the Apollo Program, when numerous launches left their first and second stages to drop into the ocean when they were finished. But what you are missing is, those rockets really weren’t that expensive. We didn’t spend a billion dollars on a rocket, the rockets themselves were far cheaper. What we spent billions of dollars on was the research on how to build the rockets in the first place… and we still have all that research!
In fact, Elon Musk very likely would not be launching his Falcon Rockets without research he got from NASA… and I’m betting he got it for free. Anybody else out there thinking maybe Elon should be paying us back for that research?
No, we didn’t throw billions of dollars into the oceans, we spent billions on technology that we still have, knowledge doesn’t go away when you use it.
Now to the second part, how does any of that benefit us “down here on Earth”?
That’s (in some ways) much easier, and yet the list of everything beneficial would take pages and pages, so I’ll try to limit them to a few of the more important ones. Do you know anyone who is disabled and needs a wheelchair, or someone elderly that uses a walker to get around? Those devices are far stronger and lighter than they otherwise would be without the light weight materials research done by NASA for the Space Program. Know anyone who’s had a heart attack, or anybody that needed an EEG, EKG, or Cat Scan? You may have even needed some of those things yourself; all of that is a direct result of the remote monitoring research that allowed NASA to monitor the health of the astronauts from thousands of miles away. And that is just a tiny part of the medical benefits that the space program lead to. (Pace makers and the small batteries that power them, better and more efficient drugs, a whole slew of technological apparatus)
Have you ever had to prepare for bad weather? How did you know that bad weather was coming? Our weather forecasting was a real joke in the days before satellites… sure we still make jokes about the weatherman getting it wrong, but we seldom have the sort of unexpected natural disasters that we had before reliable weather satellites became prevalent. As I type this, I can pull out my cell phone (more tech derived from NASA and space research) open a weather app, and watch Hurricane Beryl in real time as it approaches the coast of Texas. And as I said, that cell phone, that laptop, that desktop computer you have? All are direct products of space research.
I don’t particularly like this next one much, but our military is the strongest on the planet because DARPA got so much technology and research directly from NASA as well.
Your car gets 30 miles per gallon of gas, or more, instead of the 10 or 12 cars used to get in the fifties. Partly because of computer and other tech, and again, partly because of lightweight materials research from NASA.
I could go on and on and on… but that should sufficiently prove my point. All of our lives are so much better because of research and technology that grew directly out of the Apollo Program, that trying to claim we wasted any money at all is ludicrous.
Many of the things we now know are problems we only learned about because of space exploration. Climate change being the most obvious thing. We know more about climate change and it’s causes because of the space program, which if we had never done those things, we might all be struck dumb when the effects hit us unexpectedly.
But what does any of this have to do with Project 2025, you ask.
Ah, I was just getting to that. Why do you think America was “first” in the sixties, and seventies? It wasn’t because we were winning wars…we weren’t. It wasn’t because we had the greatest economy, although we did have a pretty good one, but again, why did we have such a good economy?
In the early 1960’s, John F. Kennedy said we would put a man on the moon in ten years. He himself was assassinated before he could see it become reality, but we, as a nation, made that dream come true, and we were the leaders and envy of the world at the time.
One of the reasons was the Apollo Program. We were first because we were doing research nobody else could do. We were first because we had a national goal, and we were willing to work toward that goal. We only began to slide down when we started losing sight of the goal, when we abandoned our lofty visions of the future for “austerity” programs like Reaganomics. When we decided that making the rich richer was all that mattered to us.
And Project 2025 is the capstone of the Reagan vision for America. No more education unless it’s “Christian Education”. No more equality, that’s a big waste of time and too “liberal”. Women need to stay home and make babies, not work and contribute to society. (did you know that there was an entire team of women that did all the massive calculations for orbital mechanics for the Moon Landings, because we didn’t have nice desktop sized computers back then? Or that it was a woman that worked out how to calculate those orbital dynamics in the first place?)
But not according to the Heritage Foundation… nope. Women are only good for making more white babies so those other people don’t out breed us. Their proper place is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant and making me a sammich!
And screw all that “diversity” crap. Nobody but us white folks can achieve anything of value, no black or brown person ever really contributed to society!
These folks who think we need to go back to some idealized “Christian Nation” that never actually existed and was never what the founders wanted in the first place will be dooming our children to be uneducated morons who will never be able to compete with nations like China, where they value a good education.
You think China is “beating” us now? Just wait until we have a whole generation of kids that were taught that the earth is flat and covered by a firmament dome, and that God created us from dirt. Just wait until they know the Ten Commandments off by heart, but can’t do a quadratic equation to save their lives.
Nations like China and Russia are all too happy to see us embracing “Christian Nationalism” because it assures them they won’t have to compete with Dumbfuckistan anymore.
So, put on your red MAGA hat, drink your Coors Light, set off some red white and blue fireworks with your remaining three fingers, and watch as your country becomes the third world shithole Donald Trump keeps telling you it already is…